Robert Dewar was born in East Africa in 1955, and was educated in South Africa. He has a degree in History. As a young man he worked as a field guide and ranger in Southern Africa. In later years he worked as a business researcher and writer. He has lived in East Africa, South Africa, Namibia, the United Kingdom, Malta and the Far East. He now lives in the Scottish Highlands.
I wrote "Mallaig Road" during the Covid lockdowns of 2020 - 2021, as an antidote to anxiety and unhappiness. And a most effective antidote it proved to be. Through the boy-hero, Alexander Maclean, I was able to recall a time in my own life when anxieties were few, and, like unhappiness, were fleeting. I hope the reader too will be transported back in time to a place where anxieties and unhappiness were scarce and fleeting.
The story in "Mallaig Road" (the name of the Cape Town suburban street in which the family home is located), opens in 1965, shortly after Alexander Maclean's tenth birthday, and is set for the most part in Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula. It closes with Alexander's extended visit to the United Kingdom in 1976. He is now twenty-one years old.
Mallaig Road's sequel, "Hemispheres," picks up where "Mallaig Road" leaves off. "Hemispheres" charts the course of Alexander's life through to 2021, by which time he is sixty-six years old. Alexander Maclean has lived a fascinating and at times chaotic life, with repeated journeys between Africa and Britain, and periods spent living in Malta and the Far East.
Both "Mallaig Road" and "Hemispheres" contain some heavily fictionalised autobiographical material. They are, however, primarily works of fiction, and should be read (and I hope, enjoyed) as such.
My third novel, "Of Sidearms and Dinner Jackets," is set in British East Africa in the early 1960s, during the last days of European rule. Published in late November 2023, this story is entirely a work of fiction. I very much enjoyed writing the story: it contains high drama, violence, tragedy - and romance - and is set during the final years of a colonial culture and lifestyle located in a region I once knew well.
Societies in a state of collapse, of catastrophic change, have always fascinated me, and "Of Sidearms and Dinner Jackets" charts just such a societal cultural collapse.
My fourth novel, "Nineteen Seventy-Six," is, once again, entirely a work of fiction. Published in late October 2024, the story is located exclusively within Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula, during a period of heightened racial tension and periodic outbreaks of violence in South Africa. The focus of the story is not, however, on political events during 1976, but on the lives of the characters found in a residential hotel far down the Peninsula. Once again, I write about a region with which I was intensely familiar, during a period I remember well.
In my fifth novel, "Saint Blaise" (due to be published in late February 2025), much of the action takes place (as with "Nineteen Seventy-Six") in Cape Town. In this story, which opens in 1968, we pick up on the life of Blaise, a thirteen year old boy who grows up in a Catholic family in Cape Town, and we look at the events which shaped him, and at how in later life he acquires his eventual reputation as something of a Christian mystic and holy man. The story follows Blaise from Cape Town in the late 1960s, to Angola during the South African Border Wars of the mid-1970s, and then to Rhodesia during the late 1970s during her Bush War, and back to Cape Town.
My recent novels in particular - their literary style, and their content - are consciously "retro," and are set in the past. Not the distant past (the 1960s and 1970s do not seem so long ago to me), but a past which, in hindsight, seemed to embrace a period before the rise of the myriad social, cultural and political issues which so bedevil society today. It was a past in which I felt more comfortable than I do in contemporary society: I freely confess that my writing is escapist.
